A piece from my Postmodernism class — we were to write about love using a specific arsenal of words which, at one point, we had not known the meaning of. We were asked to write a poem about love, using one of these terms per line.
shakespeare sleeps
It is a white noise of rules, the homophony
of lovers’ sighs and cries of hypermediation.
He swallows it whole, capacious and starved
by a culture of words, fist high, then low.
His head and heart spits asymptotic aid into
the tempered gears of the machine, decentered
and warped by the instinct to eschew listening.
He tires, treading in the catachresis -
but the swarming voices of diachrony
breed buoyancy in this dialogic deep.